John Kenneth Galbraith: Trending quotes

“It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.”

Booknotes interview (1994)

“The advisers and counselors were not, however, analyzing the danger or even the possibility. They were serving only as the custodians of bad memories.”

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 11, Section IV, p. 130

“The fact was that American enterprise in the twenties had opened its hospitable arms to an exceptional number of promoters, grafters, swindlers, impostors, and frauds.”

Chapter IX https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Cause and Consequence, Section V, p 184 The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

“The massive reduction in risk that is inherent in the development of the modern corporation has been far from fully appreciated.”

Chapter IX https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Cause and Consequence, Section V, p 178 The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

“Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.”

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 8, Section II, p. 87

“Men meet together for many reasons in the course of business. They need to instruct or persuade each other. They must agree on a course of action. They find thinking in public more productive or less painful than thinking in private. But there are at least as many reasons for meetings to transact no business. Meetings are held because men seek companionship or, at a minimum, wish to escape the tedium of solitary duties. They yearn for the prestige which accrues to the man who presides over meetings, and this leads them to convoke assemblages over which they can preside. Finally, there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. Such meetings are more than a substitute for action. They are widely regarded as action.”

The Sydney Morning Herald (22 May 1982), as cited in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993), edited by Robert Andrews, p. 972

“Nothing in our time is more interesting than the erstwhile capitalist corporation and the erstwhile Communist firm should, under the imperatives of organization, come together as oligarchies of their own members.”

Chapter VII https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Aftermath I, Section IV, p 139 The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XXXV, Section 2, p. 390

“Any country that has Milton Friedman as an adviser has nothing to fear from a few million Arabs.”

“It was not hard to persuade people that the market was sound; as always in such times they asked only that the disturbing voices of doubt be muted and that there be tolerably frequent expressions of confidence.”

on Friedman's advising of the Israeli government, "The Private Man and the Public Life; Interview With Galbraith", The Washington Post (26 April 1981)

“In 1736, Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette printed an apology for its irregular appearence because its printer was "with the Press, labouring for the publick Good, to make Money more plentiful."”

Source: The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929), Chapter V, The Twilight of Illusion, Section II, p. 70

“Ideas do not respect national frontiers, and this is especially so where language and other traditions are in common.”

The press was busy printing money.
Source: Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975), Chapter V, Of Paper, p. 54

“That one never need to look beyond the love of money for explanation of human behavior is one of the most jealously guarded simplifications of our culture.”

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 5, Section I, p. 47

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XII, Section 1, p. 142

“In a community wherepublic services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway.”

“I was studying agriculture, how to produce better chickens, better cattle, better horses — horses in those days — better fruit, better vegetables. This was in the early years of the Great Depression, and the thoughts crossed my mind that there wasn't a hell of a lot of use producing better crops and better livestock if you couldn't sell them, that the real problem of agriculture was not efficiency in production but the problem of whether you could make money after you produced the stuff. So I shifted from the technical side to, first, the study of agricultural economic issues and then on to economics itself.”

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 18, Section II, p. 203

“And after they have started the action will always look, as it did to the frightened men in the Federal Reserve Board in February 1929, like a decision in favor of immediate as against ultimate death. As we have seen, the immediate death not only has the disadvantage of being immediate but of identifying the executioner.”

Booknotes interview (1994)

“There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.”

Chapter IX https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Cause and Consequence, Section VII, p 190 The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XVIII, Section 5, p. 208

“The market had reasserted itself as an impersonal force beyond the power of any person to control, and, while this is the way markets are supposed to be, it was horrible.”

“Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.”

Chapter VI https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929, Things Become More Serious, Section II, p 111 The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929)